Are there any tricks to completing the Crumbling Vault?

Question

Last night I came across the Crumbling Vault event while playing my level 19 Witch Doctor solo, (well, the Templar was with me, but yeah...) and I failed it, hard. For the first 30 seconds or so, I tried killing things, but past that point I was pretty much just using Spirit Walk and moving as fast as I could to find the treasure room.

However, I was frequently overwhelmed by enemies, and often surrounded. I managed to survive to the end of the timer, and I feel like I might have been close to the end, but there's really no indication so I have no idea.

Are there any tricks to getting through this? Would particular bits of gear or types of skills help? Is there anything in particular I should be looking for as far as clues that I'm on the right track? Is this even possible to solo?

Answer 1

This is easily soloable although which class you play and your playstyle can affect your success. As you've probably figured out, killing things and fighting in general is the wrong approach. To complete the Crumbling Vault and any of the timed achievements, there are only a few things which can help you:

Luck:

• As the dungeons are generated pesudo-randomly, if you get a bad layout, your chances of success could be greatly lessened. There's a bit of a pattern to the map layouts that you can sort of pick up (possibly even picked from a set of pre-defined maps? I only mention this because I've seen some identical layouts when re-rerunning certain dungeons).
• Running into some stall champions is also a danger to your success as wallers and jailers can stop you in your tracks and their presence is entirely random.

Speed:

• Movement speed perks are helpful.
• The use of your movement ability is also invaluable. To support the use of your movement ability, having resource regen and resource improving equipment and abilities is helpful. To this end, also go in with full resource.
• Don't stop. Avoid combat and run past everything. Having minions/allies and followers out before you enter the timed section is helpful because they can draw agro away from you.
• If you do get stuck in combat, for your primary and if needed secondary attack ability, something with knockback is invaluable as it can clear a path for you very quickly. It is also preferable that this attack have some kind of AOE to clear larger space at one time.

Power:

• High health, dodge and armor can make it easy to tank your way through without worrying about your health. Buffing these can greatly help survivability. I find dodge more useful as attacks that miss don't affect durability or require healing.
• High attack power can really help speed you up as being able to one-hit the enemies will make certain that moments stuck fighting will be brief. Note that your goal isn't to kill or even fight anything so it might be best to neglect attack if needed for these types of challenges.
• Being higher level helps a lot.
• Playing with a dex or strength focussed class makes a huge difference too. With a level 22 monk, I ran Crumbling Vault on my first try in under 2 minutes. I buffed dodge and ran like crazy, taking only 2 wrong turns along the way. Playing as a witch doctor is not helping your chances so you may need to rethink your equipment and abilities from what you usually use. For int classes, you may need to ignore your Int for these challenges and take the hit to DPS in exchange for Dodge/Health provided by Dex and Strength.
• In order to maximize damage and defense, learning the way that the game calculates them is very useful.

Answer 2

Ok. This is my experience with it. I tried it the first time, hack 'n slash my way through, but eventually die & timer runs out. That was with a wizard. Later on when playing my DH I found it again, and set up my skills so i Had vault, preparation and ss. my passives were tactical advantage(mvspeed buff after vault/ss), preparation (lowere discipline costs), and hot pursuit(mvspeed buff when at full hatred- dont use hatred abilities at all). Entered dungeon, just used vault again and again, then restored discipline, using ss to survive sticky situations. I died many, many times, but i finally managed to get a view of the whole map, and completed it with 1 min 2 sec to spare.

Answer 3

You probably just want to be able to bulldoze the majority of the enemies, as you can sometimes get snagged if you try to just bypass them all. Gear and levels can help.

As far as classes go, you can beat this level as a non-Demon Hunter, but it's like a shootout in soccer - you guess the wrong direction, and you lose (in this case, because of a long detour with a dead end; I made it through with 30 seconds to spare one time with a WD, but completely failed the second time).

If you're a Demon Hunter, you can just use tumble/smokescreen with your level 10 passive to move so fast that it doesn't even matter, at least as long as Blizzard doesn't nerf Demon Hunter mobility down to something reasonable. Until such a time, you might want to use Demon Hunter for pretty much any achievement that requires running around a lot, such as the Staff of Herding quests in particular.

Answer 4

If you need it for an achievement, there's always the option to come back later with a stronger character (one that is already in Nightmare, for example), that can one-hit all the enemies in that dungeon.